"It would look perfect right - there," Terry told me, his finger pointing at the center of the spherical room.
         "What would?" I asked. My stomach was still settling.
         "Sputnik. Glass case, shielded, spotlight. Perfect."
         "What?"
         "Sputnik - remember, old Russian satellite, started the Space Race, et cetera? Hell, Jimmy, we need something to get the tourists in here. Something that no other bar has -"
         "Terry, you don't have competition for two hundred miles."
         "And I wanna keep it that way. Gotta be something unique. What better?"
         Terry Raines, President of Cosmodyne, Inc., was in one of those moods, and with a few tens of billions of dollars to burn, you could either enable him or say no and clean it up when he ignored you. I know.
         I'm not a physicist, or an astronomer. Not even an engineer. Those guys belong up here in orbit, running this mansion in the stars disguised as a space station. Terry is the one who had the notion, five years ago, to hijack an asteroid and insert it in Earth orbit, had all the numbers worked out so that he wouldn't drop it into the middle of the Pacific and cause an extinction event. Greg Wells designed the booster, quick and simple, got it into space and parked 2009 BT in L4.
         I'm James Patrick Grant, Esq. I'm the one who made it all legal. Or at least palatable to the government[s], greased the skids and saved our collective hindquarters.
         For that, my reward is a one-third split. Of everything. And everything is quite a bit. 2009 BT was an average M-type asteroid, 2km in diameter with about 3 billion tons of nickel-iron ore - about the world production for three years. What we - I - did was to offer contracts and leases. Mining rights to 3M and Alcoa. Merck and Bayer set up micro-G pharmaceutical labs. Property leases to the Americans, the Russians, the Japanese and the Brazilians for science stations. Most of the initial first-year lease money was plowed right back into the operation, buying and building the equipment to get to orbit and move around and live there.
         Other nations and corporations were moving out into orbit and beyond - with a little help. Terry said that Cosmodyne's role was like that of the frontier sutlery, setting up shop in a opportune spot and selling to all the westward-ho types passing by on the trail to riches or ruination.
         Ore was processed in orbit, sold to corporations and nations alike, fabricated into spacecraft which flew to the far points of the solar system, which in turn were fueled and provisioned with water and volatiles taken from the second asteroid we captured, a carbonaceous chondrite three miles around. America was going back to the Moon. The Japanese (dba Mitsubishi) were headed to Mars, neck-and-neck with the Americans and the Chinese. The Russians were said to be thinking big, leapfrogging Mars altogether and heading to the asteroid belt or Jupiter. Not to mention the private ventures outward bound. And they were all paying customers. Private enterprise was doing in five years what governments had failed to do for decades.
         I also cut a deal with the Hilton chain for a luxury resort - the transportation problem solved itself with a year, Hilton joining with Virgin Atlantic for a regular shuttle service. It wasn't quite the gleaming white double-wheel and Pan Am spaceliner I thrilled to as a boy when I first saw 2001: A Space Odyssey, but it was good enough. Still, it was a long way from competing with Vegas.
         The bar we stood in was proof enough. Oh, sure, you could get a screwdriver or a draft beer brewed on-site with ingredients from our hydroponics farm, served up chilled in a souvenir bulb. The burgers and hot wings were okay, if you didn't mind soy; the potatoes we grew hydroponically. But there was no, pardon the old pun, atmosphere. A nice big plexiglass port giving a panoramic view of Earth every hour as Avalon spun on its axis. No neon signs, no pool tables, and definitely no tobacco smoke. There was a jukebox, though, the only saving grace. It needed more. It needed a gimmick.

         "We can't get Sputnik," I told Terry the next day. We were in his office/private hideout, which was a bubble on the top of a long tube jutting from the surface of the asteroid. The top two-thirds of the bubble was hardened plexiglass. It afforded one hell of a view. With the lights off, you could lean back and imagine yourself out in space. It gave Terry peace of mind. It gave me vertigo.
         "Why not?" he asked.
         Terry was wearing his normal garb - jeans, Hawaiian-print shirt, black Cosmodyne ball cap. I had donned the more traditional blue coveralls, no stray bits of clothing to float away in the negligible gravity.
         "Why not?" Terry asked me again. "Hell, the Soviet Union went out of business thirty years ago. If the Russian Federation couldn't object to the ABM Treaty, they can't claim ownership of a metal basketball that doesn't even work."
         "Sputnik's orbit decayed and it re-entered on January 4, 1958. Burned up."
         "Oh." He was momentarily crestfallen. "Sputnik II?" His face brightened.
         I knew Terry, so I came prepared. "Nope. It came down in April '58." Cremating poor Laika.
         "Sputnik -"
         "Three burned up on re-entry in April 1960. Four came down in September '62, over Manitowoc. Five was a research vehicle containing two dogs, forty mice, two rats and some plants. Launched in August 1960, recovered one day later. Six exploded during descent, killing Pchelk and Muska. Seven -"
         "Forget it," Terry waved his hand. "No one cares about number seven of anything. Nuts. It was a great idea."
         I hated myself for what I said next. If I'd kept quiet, the whole mess might have been avoided. "There's still Vanguard."
         Terry's ears perked up. "Vanguard? Hey, wait a minute. First American satellite launched -"
         "Second, actually. Explorer I was the first, but it burned up on re-entry in March 1970. But Vanguard's still up there. And idle."
         "Yeahhh," Terry said, staring out at space. He was in the middle of a horseshoe-shaped console, blinking lights and glowing screens showing him his little empire. He was getting that look again. "That would work. They know where it is?"
         "Sure. You can get it off the web in less than five clicks," I said casually, and Terry bent over a keyboard, began clicking, thirty seconds later he had the same screen I'd used. "Apogee 3969 km, perigee 654 km, inclination 34 degree - hell, it'd be a piece of cake."
         "Maybe," I conceded, knowing little of orbital mechanics. "But there's still the problem of ownership."
         "Phooey," he spat derisively. "It's gotta be the oldest bit of space junk out there. Dead. Abandoned. I mean, sure, Uncle Sam had title when it blasted off, but the last seventy-odd years. . .Uncle Sucker doesn't miss the military hardware they burn up in Kurdistan or Malaysia every year. What's a basketball-sized piece of junk ain't worked in seventy years gonna matter?"
         And that, as they say, was that.

         As it turned out, Terry was right.
         "Legally, we can do it," I told him two days later. I was back on terra firma - well, on a deck, anyway, surrounded by thirty thousand acres of the Kansas Flint Hills. I had built a house here, used the rest as a wildlife refuge, creating a nice little tax dodge. I squinted into the sunset, and in the distance saw a herd of buffalo I'd started a few years ago. Fall was coming, they were grazing on bluestem grass to put on fat for the winter. There was a chill in the air already.
         "You're sure?" Terry's face filled the netphone screen. It was five here, around midnight UT on Avalon, but Terry kept odd hours.
         "Yeah. There is no law of salvage for space. The UN Committee on the Development of Space has been kicking around a treaty the last three years."
         "And it'll be years before they actually sign one."
         I shrugged. "There's no need. The only reason to have a salvage law is to create a solid legal environment where a person can claim abandoned property as his own."
         "Like Vanguard," Terry said.
         "Right, but for what purpose? With the law of sea salvage, you let entrepreneurs claim some sunken treasure ship, recovering historical objects and making a huge profit in the process. Space commerce hasn't reached the point where we have Spanish Galleons loaded with doubloons riding the spaceways. No one has really thought to grab some of the older satellites, mainly because most of the important ones like Sputnik are gone, or not that meaningful. There might be some incentive to clean up space junk, getting stuff out of orbit for a bounty fee from a government -" I trailed off, another lucrative line of operations forming a germ in my mind. "Or to snag some scrap metal for processing."
         He laughed. "We solved that problem, didn't we?"
         I had to agree, watching a hawk circle overhead, glancing at the coppery harvest moon rising in the east.
         "Anyhow," he continued, "I talked to Greg, and he tells me it should be a cinch. All we gotta do is modify an OTV, put a remote arm on and storage bin on it. And one thing, Jimmy. No publicity. None at all."
         "S.O.P., Terry. I was the one that came up with it, remember?" On theory that it was always easier to apologize than ask permission, always better to present a fait accompli than a wild-eyed scheme, Cosmodyne, Inc., had a strict no-news policy prior to an operation. It also prevented a raft of bad news should one of our projects fail spectacularly. "So we launch when?" I half-knew the answer.
         "Two days," Terry said with a grin. "I told him to start after we talked."
         I sighed. It was typical Terry, impulsive and unstoppable once he had his mind fixed on something. It had to do, I theorized, with his upbringing, a child prodigy born to parents with sizable financial resources, able to send him to private schools, humor his interest in astronomy, give him everything he wanted; Terry had rarely heard the word "no." It was why he was currently on his third marriage, why part of his fortune had been paid out to two ex-wives, the second being the biggest settlement in history after Paul McCartney's. Of course, he made it all back in a year.
         Greg, by contrast, was a farm-boy, used to fixing old equipment with baling wire, also not one to take no for an answer, but aware that the world and stars had limits. As an engineer, he was more level-headed, could stand back take a deep breath. He was on his first and likely only marriage, to a girl he'd met in college, and earthside he drove a twenty-year old pickup.

         It took three days for Greg's team to rig the equipment on the Orbital Transfer Vehicle. The OTV was an ungainly contraption, a big box on a metal framework, fuel tanks and thrusters welded onto the rear of the framework. Greg's people attached a robotic arm to the front, waldoed to the cabin. The cabin had one hatch and no airlock, forcing the crew of three max to wear pressure suits for safety's sake.
         They launched from Avalon into a low, slow orbit, waiting for Vanguard to swing around and catch up. Calculations said they had about five hours to wait for a basketball-sized hunk of metal. Terry was on Avalon, which had become his refuge of late, from the world and its problems, one of which was his current wife. Greg was also on Avalon, to supervise the mods on the OTV. The maintenance guys on the rock could have done it, with minimal instruction from Greg, but he had that hands-on itch that all engineers get, the feeling that looking at blueprints all day isn't enough, they have to get out and build, damn it, dig a hole, pour some concrete, knock down an old-growth forest for a freeway, anything. Greg was built for that - big and brawny, six-four, like a linebacker for the Chiefs, blond hair brushed back from his leonine face falling past his collar. I'd nicknamed him "Tarzan" years ago.
         I watched it all from home. I read a lot of science fiction in my youth, which is why Terry and Greg thought of me when they hatched their little scheme years ago. But actual space travel left me in a cold sweat. I could barely handle flying, and preferred to take a maglev or just drive when I had to travel. Thanks to communications technology, I could do almost everything from my house. I had a secured line to Avalon, and Terry ran a live-feed through it. I puttered about the house, went for a jog along a dirt road, and returned, toweling off my face, as the clock read 00:21. The talk between the crew and Avalon control was a big improvement on the old Apollo-era audio that was garbled and interlaced with random beeps.
         "Coming up on you, 1000 kilometers." Terry's voice. It was early afternoon up there, so of course he'd be up and present at the Big Event.
         "Lidar locked on. Initiating correction burn." Picking up speed to match Vanguard. "Visual on long-range." The screen image wobbled, and enlarged, and there it was, a gleaming sphere with four spindly arms protruding, tumbling lazily in its orbit. The image was still fuzzy, so no details were clear, but it was intact, and that was all that Terry cared about, wasn't it?
         The chase and capture wasn't like Star Trek or Star Wars, no whoosing sounds or mechanical noises as the arm extended and Vanguard drew nearer. A series of small, minute bursts on the OTV's thrusters, watching the arm extend upward, ready to hook the satellite. It was fairly humdrum, unless you knew the complex forces at work, all laid out by Isaac Newton centuries ago. After an hour, Avalon control announced that Vanguard was now a mile above the OTV, speeds and courses had matched.
         This is where the pilot, a former Air Force major named Kate Garnett who'd flown a couple of Shuttle missions just before they retired the fleet, earned her pay. She put the OTV on manual, and began easing it "upward" toward Vanguard - "up" being a relative term, since the satellite was closer to Earth than the OTV. Closer and closer, the last two hundred feet almost excruciatingly slow, the OTV moving at less than a half a mile an hour, until only thirty feet separated the two craft. The arm extended, swinging towards the small sphere. The three fingers of the robotic hand gently closed around Vanguard, and a collective release of breath followed by a raucous round of cheers went up in the control room. The arm slow retracted, stowed the satellite in a padded bay on the front of the OTV.

         Terry made the announcement the next day. It was enough to make the top stories in all the 24-hour networks. The shows replayed ancient black-and-white stock footage of all those early launches, the rockets getting a foot off the ground before falling back in a gout of flames, and the Vanguard launch on March 17, 1958, that finally got the U.S. off the starting blocks in the Space Race.
         Reaction from the U.S. Government was muted. Vanguard had been classified as "space junk" for so long that no one could argue with the press release I drafted. I used all the right phrases - "salvage," "object of historical significance," "hazard to navigation" among them. The President's press secretary gave a noncommittal answer at the daily press briefing the next day, informing the world that she was pleased that Cosmodyne, Inc. had performed a benevolent service to mankind by retrieving this most unique object. Of course, when they found out that it wasn't bound for the Smithsonian but a bar, their attitude soured.
         Nonetheless, it was better than I'd hoped. I'd planned on at least one angry denunciation from a Congresscritter, or some Third World UN types, but nary a word. I suppose that people were more interested in what was happening now, and the plans for the Moon and Mars, than a tiny satellite that had quit working fifty years ago.
         Terry was beaming the next time I saw him, a month later. He'd asked me to come up and see Vanguard, and my curiosity overcame my space-sickness, helped by a liberal dose of scopolamine. Terry allowed me a day to adjust, and then showed off his - our - prize. Greg was also there.
         We stared at it in awe. The metal was pitted and dull. A basketball-sized metal orb was our gleaming ticket to the Space Age? It seemed incredible. As we stood admiring it, Terry broke the silence.
         "You know what we need now," he said in a voice that he tried to keep spontaneous, but I could tell he was mouthing words he'd decided on long ago.
         "What?" we both asked warily.
         Terry pointed over to the middle of the lobby. "I think a lunar rover would look perfect right there."
         Greg and I looked at each other, alarm in our eyes. This wasn't going to be so easy.

         With the Vanguard operation, tongues were loosened. When word leaked out that we were planning to snag a lunar rover, the reaction was quite different than what had accompanied the Vanguard operation. For some unfathomable reason, recovering a moon buggy was a different matter.
         It was a toss-up as to which one to recover. The Apollo 16 rover had experienced some mechanical problems stemming from a broken fender. No fender, moon dust got thrown up, covering the astronauts and getting in the machinery, leading to battery problems overheating. Gene Cernan had bumped the fender on the Apollo 17 rover. Cernan and Duke had rigged a replacement with some EVA maps, clamps and duct tape - which brought a broad smile to Greg's face. "True engineers," he beamed, having used baling wire and duct tape on the farm more than once. The Apollo 15 rover was, as far as could be determined, still good. Like New, Only 17 Miles, One Owner! Greg had thought that the Apollo 17 rover would be best, a tribute to human ingenuity in the most trying circumstances, but Terry vetoed that. So Apollo 15 it would be.
         If the underreaction to Vanguard had taken us by surprise, the overreaction to the moon buggy operation was a stunner. NASA issued a statement brimming with indignation. "It is outrageous that a piece of scientific equipment that proved so crucial in early exploration of the moon is now to be displayed as a bauble in a frontier watering-hole," the statement began. "NASA and the government of the United States have never relinquished control or title over the craft left on the moon, and consider the LRV, the Apollo Lunar Module Descent Stages, the Surveyor craft, to be the sole property of the United States of America."
         The White House provided a similar reaction. Ditto for assorted Congresscritters. The news channels and sites were all over us, calling us "pirates" at best. At worst, we were compared to the scum who had looted King Tut's tomb and other priceless treasures. Gallup had the public against us by two to one. The UN Committee on Outer Space was said to be speeding up its work on the space salvage treaty, and most of the major powers - Russia, China, Japan, Brazil, and the EU - were urging speedy ratification.
         Terry was undaunted. "Screw 'em," he said dismissively. "Not like I'm planning to bring back the Eagle from Tranquility Base. Although -" and he got a faraway look in his eyes.
         "Stop it," I snapped at him. "We're in enough trouble as is."
         "Then get us out of it," he said simply.
         I tried NASA, but no one was taking my calls. Meetings, the apologetic secretaries said. With Cosmodyne as the topic, no doubt.
         The next day, I got a call from Jennifer Gillespie. We had gone to law school together, dated for a year and then decided it wasn't going to work because we had very different career goals. I was solidly in the lower half of the middle third of our class, ended up doing early-bird criminal docket calls and nasty divorces for a big Kansas City firm for five years. Jennifer made Law Review, landed a prize clerkship with a federal appellate judge after graduation, made connections and then landed a job as an assistant counsel to the Senate Science and Technology Committee, under the patronage of Senator Byron Morris (R - Colorado).
         I was making an appearance at Cosmodyne's offices in Wichita. Since Greg had worked for Boeing before he signed on to our little venture, and I was in Kansas City,
         we'd decided to locate the offices here. Terry bitched about having to move back here from Reston and NASA-Ames, but he'd grown up in Wichita, so it was mostly show.
         My office was on the tenth and top floor of the building we'd erected on the north side of town. The nuts-and-bolts stuff went on in orbit. We dealt with and generated the paper. Leases, subcontracts for equipment and parts, Worker's comp, and more, all done in a hushed, shag-carpeted teak-and-mahogany ambient lit atmosphere. Sometimes I missed meeting with clients in orange jail jumpsuits smelling of BO and piss and puke.
         One of the fashion-model receptionists we handsomely paid to be the public face of Cosmodyne announced the call in her whispery come-hither voice. I took it with a mixture of anticipation and dread.
         "Jen," I greeted her. "You look good." No lie - Jen was slim, fit, tanned, looked fifteen years younger than her age. No gray in that raven hair yet. The blue eyes -
         "Thank you, Jim." White teeth flashing; we had parted on good terms and still were. "You've made quite a name for yourself in the last couple of years."
         "Reckon I have," I replied smoothly. "Still wanna marry into money?"
         "Sorry, sweetie. Give it a few years. I don't want you to be a rebound," she smiled sweetly, not at all sarcastic. Her first marriage had ended five years ago. "I didn't call to talk dirty to you -"
         "You're more than welcome to anytime -"
         A sigh, a smile, rolled eyes. "I wanted to give you some information. It's about Terry and his latest scheme. What in God's name is he thinking?"
         "You know Terry," I said. "He wants a moon buggy, no one's gonna tell him no." Well, I would, but he wouldn't listen. Greg - Greg was too caught up in the mechanics of proving it could be done. No help there.
         "Well, there's some people here who aren't real happy about it. I've seen the NASA chief here going in and out of offices. I also got word that he was at the White House and the Pentagon yesterday."
         "So he's mad we're gonna beat his agency back to the Moon." The fiftieth anniversary of Apollo 11 had come and gone with no permanent U.S. presence; like everything else, the timetable on Orion 15 had slipped. Three years later, things looked like they might make it for the sixtieth.
         She blew out an exasperated breath. "No, Jim, and you damned well know it. It means that if you go ahead with this mission, you may very well find yourselves in a lot of trouble. The kind that doesn't get served by subpoena."
         "I'm guessing that this information isn't cleared for distribution," I replied evenly. Damn you, Terry, 'get us out of trouble' indeed -
         "It's not hard info," she said. "Just the observations of one person." Who was highly connected to a long-serving and powerful senator, tied into the White House and Pentagon, with contacts all over, and no I don't want to know how some of them became contacts, old lovers or flames. If Jen was telling me this much, how much more was she holding back?
         "I'm touched to know you still care," I told her seriously.
         "I always did," she smiled. "I still do." She bit her lower lip. "I'll give you a rain check on that dirty phone call." She winked and signed off, and I sat back, my mind racing with visions of Space Marines and raven hair and olive skin.
         Two days later, I found out she was right.

         I was on a call with Greg, who was still back on Avalon. He had been working on a plan to retrieve the rover. Greg had at first thought that we could modify an OTV, rig a winch and sling underneath, drop one or two people down, slip the harness over the rover, and lift it up. I asked about collateral damage, Greg gave me a blank look. "Collateral damage - the OTV has to hover, right? It has to use thrusters to lift, right?" An OTV has a dozen attitude control thrusters, small nozzles that fire a LOX mix to control pitch and yaw. Greg nodded. "You'll be hovering - what, twenty, thirty -"
         "Twenty-five feet."
         "Right. Overhead. So what happens to the site when they fire? The reaction kicks up a lot of dust. Not to mention you've got two astronauts wandering around, hooking up the sling. It's going to deface the site. And that means the preservationists will really go off the deep end." He frowned, I put up my hands. "I'm trying to minimize the fuss, is all. Orders."
         Greg thought, and nodded. "Well, we can't drive it off. The batteries are dead. And they're not rechargeable, so we can't use jumper cables. Although that would be pretty cool, huh?"
         I nodded. "So we get new batteries. How hard could it be?"
         "Not very," Greg admitted. "The rovers used two 36-volt silver-zinc potassium hydroxide batteries. Can't go to Sears for one, but I suppose we could build some here. Or build something similar."
         "And keep the originals," I added. "Historical preservation and all."
         "Sure. Gimme a coupla days," Greg said eagerly, and signed off. I sighed. Terry's whim to build a space museum for a bar was getting tiring.
         One of my receptionists, the redhead this time, announced that I had a visitor. I asked who, and she gave me a name and added, "He's from the State Department." I groaned - my day was going to get worse, and it wasn't even noon yet. I closed my eyes, tried to envision myself back home, on my deck, fall colors and air around me, the afternoon sun warming my face, buffalo grazing. . .
         "Mr. Grant?" The voice was deep and unctuous, just what you'd expect from a skid-greasing political appointee. I opened my eyes, and the redhead was showing in a tall man, brush-cut hair and chiseled jaw, Roman nose, in an impeccably tailored suit and silk tie - a budding Secretary of State in training. He walked up to me, turned on a 100-watt smile, extended his hand, displaying a Rolex. I stood and took the warm and soft hand. "I'm Clark Hagerty, Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs."
         He waited, the smile frozen on his face, obviously waiting for me to genuflect. I remained standing, gripping his hand harder, all those summers on my uncle's wheat farm paying off. I didn't say anything, and Hagerty began talking again haltingly. "I'm here about your company's plans to retrieve U.S. Government property."
         I let go, and motioned to the leather chair in front of my desk. "Sit down. Why is the State Department in on this?"
         "It's rather unusual," Hagerty said. "We're improvising here, like you are. This situation has never arisen before."
         "No one's had the capability before," I countered. "Get used to it. Space is opening up."
         "Er, yes, well that's the problem," Hagerty said, crossing his legs. "My office is quite insistent that you cease and desist with your plans to retrieve the Apollo 15 Lunar Rover."
         "Our position is well-known, Mr. Hagerty. The Lunar Rover is abandoned property, space junk, if you will, just like every inoperative satellite in orbit, just like every spent booster, like every crashed or failed probe. There's no law of salvage for space objects, so we're simply applying the law of the sea." That's our story and we're sticking to it. "Government-owned objects can be salvaged, if it is determined that they are abandoned - it's called the law of finds. Under the Public Vessels Act and the Brussels Convention of 1967, a salvage claim can be made on abandoned U.S. property by an American national."
         "I'm aware of all that," Hagerty said archly. "But there are a couple of points about your argument over which there is disagreement. First, we deny that the Apollo 15 rover or any of the other equipment was 'abandoned.' We have retained title to it for the past fifty years and have reasserted our claim to it."
         I snorted. "Your government had fifty years to follow up on Apollo. If you hadn't thrown money into Vietnam, or the entitlement sinkhole, you could have had a moonbase up and running by 2000, sending out expeditions to retrieve Apollo artifacts or protect the sites. Hell, your next mission isn't even scheduled to arrive for another three years, and it's going to be at the north pole, hundreds of miles from any of the Apollo sites. I don't think that shows ability, much less intent, to retain ownership."
         "Well, yes, Orion 15 has experienced some difficulties," Hagerty admitted sheepishly, but then his face took on a calmer expression. "That should not be seen as the full extent of American lunar missions, though. It would be possible to equip and outfit a smaller expedition, one with, shall we say, a more limited mission in mind."
         His watery blue eyes caught mine and drilled into me, and it took a second or two for me to catch on. The sonofabitch just threatened us - 'smaller expedition,' 'more limited mission,' Jen telling me NASA's head honcho was visiting the Pentagon - they were sending a small military force to stop us.
         I'd been in enough hearings and trials and watched enough cases go south in front of my eyes so that I kept my demeanor calm, nonchalant even. "If you can launch a salvage mission of your own in time, that's your right -"
         "I wasn't speaking of a salvage mission, Mr. Grant." He stopped dead, letting it sink in.
         So it was a threat. Send in the Space Marines to intercept the OTV? Have them land on Avalon, storming it like the shores of Tripoli? And if we're going to go Rambo on this, Mr. Hagerty, how'd you like a mile-wide rock dropped on your office? I let that slide.
         "I don't believe we have anything more to discuss, Mr. Hagerty. Our operation is going ahead, and that's final." I stood, and escorted him to the door, fighting the urge to have security frog-march him to his limo.
         Hand shaking, heart fluttering, I called Terry, who was in an ebullient mood. I relayed my conversation with Hagerty to him, and he exploded in a burst of profanity. "I oughta drop this friggin' rock on him, the bastard. What balls - come in and threaten me like that. The hell's he gonna do, anyhow, send in the Marines?"
         "Maybe," I said. "Whether any of their units have zero-gee training is beyond me."
         The more I thought about it, the more it looked like a bluff. I hadn't heard anything about training military personnel in orbit - the ISS barely had enough room for its science crew. Cosmodyne hadn't leased any space to Uncle Sam for a barracks. If it wasn't manned, then it would be unmanned, and that meant one thing - a missile with a warhead. But would the feds shoot down a manned vehicle, kill the occupants, over a salvage operation? They couldn't be that desperate. Could they?
         Terry waved his hand. "Greg tells me we'll be ready to roll in a week, maybe less. NASA doesn't have anything that's lunar-mission capable. No way they can get a mission off in that short a window. Hell, if they did, they'd be back on the Moon by now. Relax." He then began relaying some of the details of the planned salvage mission to me.
         What Greg was designing, and what Terry was demanding, was unbelievably risky. NASA, ESA, not even the Chinese would have gone for strapping a bunch of fuel and air tanks to a vehicle meant only for short trips in orbit. The cabin would have minimal furnishings, two hammocks for three crew, so they'd have to hot-rack. Three days out, three back, one to get the LRV - the details were frightening, but Terry had found more than enough volunteers for the mission. The crew would have the distinction of being the first men on the moon since 1972, and a shot at the history books was more than any astronaut could resist.
         Towards that end, I'd had an idea that at the time seemed incredibly crass, but later turned out to be a lifesaver. The first moon landing in over fifty years would be a big deal, and everybody would want a piece of it. I took an idea from Gus Grissom, who'd taken a roll of dimes on his ill-fated Liberty Bell 7 flight back in the early 1960s (I'd seen the craft on display when I was a kid, right after they'd winched it from the bottom of the Pacific back in '99).
         The mission launched from Avalon five days later. One hour later, Avalon control detected a burn from high orbit, 25,000 miles above the earth. I got the word at about four a.m., Terry's face appearing on the netphone screen in my living room after the alarm had roused me from sleep.
         "Terry," I said, yawning and staring out the large window at the Flint Hills, "you've got to get on Central Standard Time if you want to do this."
         "It's four a.m., I know," Terry said excitedly. "We launched the salvage mission ninety minutes ago - flawless, by the way. An hour after that, we detected a de-orbiting burn in high orbit, and the object began trailing ours. We're not sure what it is." It might have been the early hour, but my mind began running over the possibilities. High orbit, something prepositioned - a killsat? I balked at that, then remembered things from history - Vietnam, Iraq, Iran, Myanmar, Castro, Allende, Diem. There was no limit to the damage a government was willing to inflict to protect a vital interest.
         The screen tweeted, and then split. Greg's face appeared on the left side. "Terry, I've got an ID on the UFO. It's an ASTRO unit, placed in orbit in 2012 and deactivated in 2017." I furrowed my eyebrows, no idea what Greg was talking about. "ASTRO means Autonomous Space Transport Robotic Operations. A way to teleoperatively repair satellites in orbit, freeing up manned missions. Boeing designed it for DARPA. I worked on them when I was there years ago. It's not carrying a bomb, and it's definitely not manned."
         "So what's the game?" I asked.
         Greg rubbed his chin. "ASTRO is designed to capture old satellites and service them. I think this is the space equivalent of a Denver boot on your tire."
         Terry exploded in a shower of profanity. "So, we either wait for it to catch up, or we abort the mission now."
         "How do we get away from it?" I asked calmly.
         "I dunno if we can outrun it," Greg said. "This ain't no Dukes of Hazzard episode."
         "Hack into the system and turn it off course?" I suggested.
         "Maybe, but I'll bet whoever's piloting it - NASA, DoD - has thought of that and put up some good firewalls."
         We both sat there, staring at each other over thousands of miles of vacuum, minds churning.
         I had an idea. "Greg, can you figure out the exact vector for the ASTRO? To within a few dozen meters?"
         "Sure. Why?"
         "This one's gonna cost us money, but we'll lose if we don't." As I relayed my idea, Greg's face broke into a grin.
         In the end, the Pack Rat made it to the Moon without further incident, making a perfect orbital insertion. The news channels were all abuzz with it, talking heads barking at one another, Ph.Ds and J.Ds offering up their two cents' worth, all of it for nothing. I watched the commotion on a big-screen TV in a large corner suite in the old Executive Office Building, across the street from the White House. The summons had come late last night, from an assistant to Hagerty. I let the slight at being summoned by a stooge go. Since we had the upper hand I could be gracious.
         I entered the office to find Hagerty sitting behind a mahogany desk that cost an acre of rainforest. Arrayed in the overstuffed leather chairs in a semicircle were two more suits, a dark-haired intense fellow and a blond ice queen sitting with her legs primly crossed, and a uniform - more precisely, an Air Force uniform with two stars. Hagerty introduced them as Roger Hillman from the Justice Department, Janet Carstairs from NASA, and Gen. Thomas Twining.
         "Maybe you can start by explaining just what your crew did to U.S. Government property," Carstairs began frostily.
         "Ms. Carstairs, maybe you can tell me what that ASTRO satellite was doing chasing our ship."
         She was nonplussed, even looked prepared for it. "We're stopping a theft of government property. Now, what happened to the ASTRO? We lost telemetry hours ago."
         "Collision with some space junk, I presume. Micrometeroid. I don't know. The Pack Rat doesn't have any weapons on board," I shrugged. It did have a few thousand assorted pennies, dimes, and quarters, from the till at the Vanguard Lounge, launched at the ASTRO with a booster improvised from a fire extinguisher.
         "You're about to take government property," she insisted.
         "Bah," I dismissed it with a wave of the hand. "You haven't done a thing to keep title in fifty years. It's ours, we're bringing it back."
         "If you do," Hillman piped up in a high voice, "you'll be prosecuted for misappropriation of government property under 18 U.S.C., section 641. It's a fine of up to one hundred thousand dollars, up to ten years in prison, or both." For everyone involved - the crew for starters, Terry for having the idea, Greg and me for aiding and abetting.
         "That's a bit harsh," I said coolly.
         "Not at all," Hillman shot back, smugly. "We're trying to discourage what we believe will be a trend, people pilfering government property simply because they can. And save your little arguments on salvage rights or abandonment for the jury."
         There was a TV in Hagerty's office. "Mind?" I asked, got up and switched it on. It was already tuned to CNN, running live feeds from the Pack Rat, which was thirty seconds from touchdown. The HD picture beat the early Apollo vids by a mile; in the distance the Apollo 15 landing site was visible.
         "It's gonna be a moot point in about ten minutes," I said. "It seems our problem is that we don't have a clear idea what the law is," I began. "I'm fairly confident my salvage defense would work - I've done the research" (my associates had, actually, but it looked iron-clad). "But, further entanglement with the federal government does present problems. Namely, overhead. You have unlimited resources, and we can't run up legal bills to fight this forever. So I have a proposal."
         I spent the next half hour outlining it, and at the end, everyone seemed pleased. By the time the Pack Rat set down on the surface, the reactions ranged from smiles to grudging acceptance. At least the threats of federal prosecution had ceased.